I pride myself on never phoning it in. I’m a passionate individual and I try to always bring that fire into whatever I’m doing. I’m a big believer in Extreme
Ownership and giving 110%, cranking it 11, or whatever other euphemism you
can throw in to describe the situation.
That said, about once I year I give in and end up phoning it in on my blog.
Usually it’s because I have writer’s block and just don’t know what to write about. This time though, this time is special, a perfect storm, in more ways than one.
In no particular order, the last few weeks have included:
- Bug swatting at work after launching a ground up rewrite of our web application.
- The worst winter storm Texas has seen in the last few decades. We only got
water back today (5 or so days without) and I’ve yet to take a shower at the
time of this writing. - We had to say good-bye to the last little dude from our grumble of pugs.
- Been putting in a ton of time into one of my side projects building some new tools to help us better manage our data and improve things for our customers.
- Oh, and it’s my birthday next week.
As busy, bad, whatever, as things have been, I’ve upheld a positive attitude and
have stepped in and up where I can.
So what’s this post even about? Just a friendly reminder to folks that bad days
happen, but you can’t phone it in so quickly. Sometimes shit rolls down hill, happens in threes, or whatever and you may end up with a bad week or month.
If you start to phone it in the moment you have a bad day, you’re going to fall
behind quickly. Startups (businesses as a whole really) have peaks and valleys,
and sometimes the slog can last months. All we can really do is stay on our
grind and keep trying to improve by 1% a day.
We also need to take a moment to reflect and acknowledge the wins that may be mixed in.
Given everything going on, some positives have definitely shown through:
- My team at work has been starting to gel more and we’re starting to operate like a well oiled machine.
- As bad as the storm was and as I smell right now, we were extremely fortunate that we never lost power (aside from a few blips) and seems our pipes are all still intact.
- We found an awesome local pug breeder and are already on the list for their
next litter later this year. Pug pack 2.0 coming soon! - For the second time in my side hustlin’ career, I reached $100k+ all-time gross revenue on a project.
And if nothing else, even though I’m phoning in this week’s blog post, I was still able to write quite a bit just to say that I’m not really doing a post this week 🙂
